In my experience when I am able to pick something up quickly it's because I can exploit cross domain knowledge. I have ready-made analogies to things I understand, or I understand the domain which informs the fundamentals of the new domain.

This does not match my observations. Also, what I've heard from experts is that 'intelligent' people are more suggestible. The way society measures intelligence is thinking speed; which tends to correlate with learning speed.

Some people learn surface-level information quickly without deep integration; what educational researchers sometimes call "shallow learning." And specialization can create blind spots.